Press risks sacrificing its neutrality

Following the release of the draft Constitution and the recent Cabinet retreat in Mombasa, the reform agenda is back in the news.

The draft is now to be debated over the next one month.

There are however legitimate fears that instead of a public debate, this debate will be managed by a select few.

Constitution making is a complex process and Kenya’s has been particularly difficult, a process made even more vexing because it is constantly scuttled by sections of an anxious political elite.

Enemy of change

This class remains the enemy of change, because any change threatens their very existence.

But blame must also be stretched to the news media, particularly its coverage of this now drawn-out process.

Admittedly, Kenya’s news media has played a significant role in sustaining a discourse of political reform in the country.

Even then, its coverage of the reform agenda now raises a number of questions.

The biggest question relates to this news media’s notion of news values.

One of the most important news values in the news making process is the idea of clarity.

A news story should not be ambiguous otherwise it fails to effectively communicate its intentions.

But there is an in-built weakness to this concept.

In the pursuit of unequivocality, complex stories are deliberately simplified by news organisations to ensure that what is encoded is what the reader decodes, disregarding the fact that for any text, there are usually three possible readings.

This often leads to, for instance, the negation of context and to the deliberate avoidance of nuance.

As a consequence, news organisations do not end up with simplified stories but simplistic stories that not only misrepresent issues but also misinform audiences.

The lack of nuance in the reporting of the constitutional making process in Kenya and more particularly the reported disagreements on the draft constitution has been distinctly brazen.

A rather unsophisticated dissection has been created between the two mainstream parties PNU and ODM and between those in favour of an Executive President on the one side and on the other those in favour of an Executive Prime Minister and a so-called Ceremonial President.

The contending positions however make no such simplistic distinction.

While it is true that the main points of contention revolve around the sharing of Executive power, the argument is not as simple as is being framed.

Indeed, framing the debate as though this constriction should be a contest between PNU and ODM is wrong even if these are the two most dominant and visible political players. Are other Kenyans irrelevant in this debate?

Further, the two ‘opposing’ groups are almost without exception routinely reported as being at ‘war’, politicians said to be ‘digging in’, ‘fallouts imminent’, and such other language that communicates a polarisation that may in fact exist but is barely interrogated.

Such crass simplification of a complex story may make good headlines but it does not help inform the public.

By all means let stories be unambiguous but equally offer some detail.

What really is the basis for this polarisation?

Does it not in fact reside outside of this process?

True, the details of the debate are complex and a newspaper can only carry so much.

But that is why we have editorials, news features and opinion writers.

These should be used to unpack what is obviously a difficult and complex story.

Instead, very often, we read hand-picked opinion pieces merely used to reinforce particular positions that very often remain unsubstantiated.

This reform process is pre-eminently an elite process.

Once an elite consensus is struck, the draft will be adopted, sadly, with the help of the news media.

Whichever side of this elite wins the battle, Kenyans will merely be enlisted to ratify the draft.

The losers on the other hand will try to mobilise support to have it rejected at a referendum.

By failing to either distinguish this elite or unpack the complex document, the public is being roped in to fight ‘a war’ in which they have nothing to gain but a lot to lose.

Soon, the news media will become a platform for this polarised elite.

This is what happened during the last referendum when subtexts of news headlines easily betrayed which side news organisations were taking.

This is not to suggest that news organisations are not supposed to take a stand on such polarising issues.

Such positions only become a problem when the news media allows its agenda to be defined by sections of the political elite with which it has an unspoken pact.

Hate and destruction

Precisely because of the extent to which sections of this news media remain wedded to the political class, Kenyans have legitimate reasons to express reservations at the right of this media to take a stand on the issue.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a trusted forum for public debate, people are bound to resort to the rumour mills and to media outlets sponsored by politicians.

When that happens, we will have opened doors of hate and destruction we won’t be able to close.

This is the time for the mainstream media to rethink its coverage of the reform agenda

Dr Ogola teaches at the University of Central Lancashire. GOOgola@uclan.ac.uk